My father had said nothing to me. Yet he had kept that letter filed away for so many years, in a folder labeled with my name. It must have been for my protection, or perhaps for his own. Maybe he couldn’t face the fact that this had happened under his nose, right after my mom died. He thought rushing me to the city, pretending Anneliese had never existed, would keep me safe. I want to be angry with him, to rail against him for being so closed off. For letting something so scary happen to me, then refusing to tell me about it when I got older.

And it explains, of course, why he latched on to me for my entire childhood, his relentless watchfulness, his monitoring of my whereabouts, my every move. Anneliese—kidnapper—was the reason for a lifetime’s worth of worry, of mounting and burdensome anxiety that might have led to my dad’s premature death, his heart attack.

However, despite my best efforts, I can only imagine Anneliese as she was during the early days of our reunion, satiny and sweet, a stabilizing force in my crashing-down universe. Last night, I lay awake next to Gavin, his breath hot on my ear, and instead of burrowing myself closer to him, I thought of her, her hand on my brow that morning when I woke up hungover in her apartment all those months ago.

In his sleep, Gavin held my hand, lacing his fingers loosely through mine. The gesture was so sweet, so childlike, that I wanted to shake him off. I didn’t want to feel like a parent, an authority, a source of comfort. I wanted in that instant to be mothered, to be held against his chest like a baby. The instinct jarred me, and I’d risen out of bed and sat on the closed toilet seat for a while, a glass of water to my head.

It disgusts me how much I’m craving this maternal attention, that I’m so easily caving in on myself, and want so desperately, and plainly, to be a nurtured child again. It’s such an easy response to everything that’s happened, proving that I’m ordinary, a vulnerable, broken person like every other sad soul out there.

I always assumed that processing trauma was linear, that the five steps of grief were strict, manageable. I’m learning that that isn’t quite right, and lack of mastery over it makes me want to cower behind some older, wiser person’s legs even more.

It was all of this, all these mixed up, coursing, colliding, incomprehensible emotions, my misunderstanding of healing, that made me throw my mugs, my drinking glasses, as hard as I could, smashing them in blind rage with a booted foot before knocking my head against the wall and stifling the burgeoning scream that was beginning at the back of my throat, lest my neighbors call 311 to complain.